Now that the paperback volumes of Lovecraft’s letters are growing in both number and page-count, would a single unified online A-Z index for all the volumes be useful for researchers? <\/p>\n
Free and public, such a mega-index would serve as a cow-catcher for sales of these print-on-demand books, and would be expanded as each new volume is published.<\/p>\n
It shouldn’t take more than an hour to make, for an intern with access to the digital copies. Being a simple matter of copy-pasting out each back-of-the-book index to an Excel spreadsheet, thus…<\/p>\n
Brown University 183, 196<\/em><\/p>\n Then use a standard plugin<\/a> to place a volume identifier at the end of each index entry. Here [AG<\/strong>] = Alfred Galpin …<\/p>\n Brown University 183, 196 [AG<\/strong>]<\/em><\/p>\n Then append this index to the combined multi-book index in Excel. Once done, have Excel re-sort the whole lot by A-Z, and copy it all out to a Web page.<\/p>\n There would be problems with sorting items which begin “ of course. As in: “Tree, The”. But since all such entries have a closing ”, one would simply delete all initial “’s. Then, once A-Z sorted, have Excel add back the starting “ for any cell that contains a closing ” mark anywhere in it. One could do this by identifying such cells by using a simple highlight any cell containing ”<\/em> formula, then add back<\/a> the “ to the start of those cells.<\/p>\n Someone on Fivver could probably do this for $10, if sent a .ZIP file of the copy-pasted indexes (I think there are about twenty such books now?).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now that the paperback volumes of Lovecraft’s letters are growing in both number and page-count, would a single unified online …<\/p>\n